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THE MEDICAL REPORTS LYING ON A TABLE IN DAVID KESSLER'S office include only the thinnest detail about the death of George Korizis, a 24-yera-old Tufts University graduate and Greek citizen who died alone in his Boston apartment on April 18. But there is a curious aspect to Korizis's case that has interested Kessler, who sit he Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and who does not ordinarily pay attention to obscure deaths.

Korizi's death has been attributed to myocardial necrosis, a condition in which key heart muscle cells die and that leads to cardiac arrest. It is an unusual although not unprecedented cause of death in a healthy young man. the case became intriguing, however, when a doctor dispatched by the Greek Consulate found several empty bottles of a product called Ripped Fuel in Korizis's apartment. One of the ingredients in Ripped Fuel, an over-the-counter powder used by weight lifters to maintain lean body mass, is ephedrine, a stimulant derived from ephedra, or the mahuang plant.

The doctor recalled reading about the recent death of a Long Island man that was linked to mahuang. So he called the F.D.A., which is why several fo the agency's senior scientists and lawyers are gathering in Kessler's office ont his Tuesday afternoon: to figure out what the Commissioner should do about Korizi's death.

Or, more to the point, what he can do, because when it comes to dietary supplements - and Ripped Fuel, like thousands of herb-based products, is considered by law to be a dietary supplement, not a drug - Kessler is not allowed to do very much. A 1994 law, passed with the help of full-bore lobbying by dietary-supplement makers, severely limited the F.D.A.'s power int he supplement regulation business. It was a signal ideological victory for those American who believe that he Government best stay out of their medicine cabinets. And it was a devastating defeat for those who believe that Government should pay an activist role in protecting the public health.

Today's meeting is focused squarely on the possible link between ephedrine and Korizis's death. But for Kessler, who has spent the past 20 months being squeezed int he fist of the Republican deregulation revolution, there is an acutely politcal subtext to any discussion about dietary supplements: the deicsion by Congress to curtail the F.D.AL.'s regulation of dietary supplements qas a prelude to its current attack on the F.D.A., and it served to remind Kessler of America's bone-deep ambivalence toward Government regulators.

But Kessler is an unapologetic enforcer of food and drug laws, and he has a lot to enforce. The F.D.A. regulates, in effect, every supermarket and pharmacy in America, one-fourth of all consumer spending - some $1 trillion of goods, including food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices and the nation's blood supply. As a result, the F.D.A. is constantly placing itself at the center of controversy. Two weeks ago, one of its advisory panels recommended that the agency approve RU-486, the so-called French abortion pill, for use in America. And now, even as Congress fights to dilute the F.D.A.'s powers, Kessler is trying to expand his agency's reach in a historic direction. Any day now, President Clinton, undoubtedly with Kessler by his side, will announce that the F.D.A. will begin regulating nicotine as a drug. It will be an announcement with profound public health - and political - consequences.

Is David Kessler a Traitor?

Three weeks before Kessler convened his working group on ephedrine, he was called onto perform an unplesant and difficult task, namely to testify before a House subcommittee whose Republican members seem to consider him the red-bearded equivalent of Ralph Nader.

An hour before the hearing, Kessler met with is deputies to prepare for curve balls. ''Tell me the difference between good hemlock and bad hemlock,'' Kessler said.

''Bad hemlock is the kind that killed Socrates,'' one of his deputies told him. ''Thanks a lot,'' Kessler said. ''What about the oleo margarine standard? Can someone please explain the margarine standard?''

The mood was good-humored, though not overly so - ''Final Jeopardy'' with a suggestion of auto-da-fe.

We left the F.D.A.'s Washington office for the short walk to the Capitol. Kessler, ordinarily an even-keeled man with the disarming manner of a pediatritician, which he is by training, turned grim. ''This is as serious as it gets,'' he said quietly, traffic shooting by him unnoticed. ''This is about the weakening of a century's worth of food and drug laws. This is about undermining the safety of the drugs Americans take.''

What troubles Kessler so strongly are three House bills, which, is enacted, could lead to the privatization of a wife slice of the F.D.A.'s drug and medical-device review work, as well as less stringent standards for drug approval and blood safety. They are the House's versions of a more moderate Senate measure that would order the F.D.A. to review all new drug applications within six months or farm the work out to private companies. The bills oculd lead to overwhleming changes in the way F.D.A. does business, changes that Kessler fears would imperil public health but that F.D.A. critics say would speed the release of life-saving drugs.

Taking his seat at the witness table, Kessler was quite literally surrounded by foes. Before him were Congressional critics, some of whom are committed to a near-libertarian vision of a self-regulating private sector. Behind Kessler, in the audience, sat the private sector itself, a blue-suited battalion of lobbyists representing the drug and medical-device industries, food-additive and dietary-supplement makers, grocery and tobacco conglomerates. All of them would like to see a more quiescent F.D.A. than the one Kessler now commands.

Kessler seems to have developed immunity against partisan attack (Newt Gingrich has labeled him a ''thug'' and a ''bully'' and conservative magazines have long treated him like a pinata), and he sat impassively as the Republicans made their opening statements.

''If you are here today to say that no, the F.D.A. will not or cannot make America's access to life-saving drugs the best in the world, don't waste my time,'' warns Richard Burr, a freshman Congressman from North Carolina.

For deregulationists, Kessler is the personification of overbearing, intrusive Government. This is partly because of his Clinton-anointed role as Public Enemy No. 1 of Big Tobacco. It was Kessler who 18 months ago handed the White House a fat political winner by redefining tobacco as a ''pediatric disease,'' not as an issue of adult choice, as the cigarette industry would have it. And it is because of tobacco that the F.D.A., never before a factor in Presidential politics, has suddenly emerged as a campaign issue.

The White House is trying to protect Kessler's scientific independence -- and thus the integrity of his proposal to regulate tobacco -- by removing itself, publicly at least, from the process. ''The F.D.A. makes its own decisions,'' says George Stephanopoulos, Clinton's senior adviser. ''The President has taken a lot of heat from tobacco companies for standing by Dr. Kessler and the F.D.A.''

Most of the heat, though, has been absorbed directly by Kessler. In fact, Bob Dole has made a point of saying that if he is elected President, he will fire Kessler. Like many Republicans, Dole says it is Kessler's overall performance, an unacceptably pro-regulation performance, that makes him persona non grata in conservative circles. But Dole is a major financial beneficiary of the tobacco industry. The Republican National Committee has taken in $2.1 million from tobacco interests since 1995, compared with $78,200 that the Democratic National Committee received. And Dole has been openly critical of Kessler's campaign to regulate cigarettes.

To the delight of the White House, Dole spent parts of June and July questioning nicotine's addictiveness and subsequently found himself drowning in ridicule. Dole and Kessler have apparently never tangled personally on the issue of tobacco; Kessler, the ostensibly nonpartisan head of an independent agency, who was in fact first appointed by President Bush, keeps publicly clear of Presidential politics, although the F.D.A.'s rollout of its tobacco regulation program will obviously add momentum to the Clinton campaign.

Kessler has, though, tangled with the other Dole, Elizabeth, who, until she took a temporary leave to campaign for her husband, served for five years as president of the American Red Cross. The F.D.A. closely regulates the Red Cross, which collects half of the nation's blood supply. Three years ago, the F.D.A. went to court to force the Red Cross into a consent decree after F.D.A. investigators found widespread weaknesses in the way it tracked donors and tested blood. Today, the F.D.A. says, the Red Cross has corrected about 75 percent of those problems.

It is unclear whether Bob Dole's animus toward Kessler might stem from his wife's F.D.A. difficulties, since Elizabeth Dole's spokeswoman steers all questions about her Red Cross service to the Red Cross and a Dole campaign spokeswoman refuses to comment. A senior Administration source says that Elizabeth Dole was ''severely agitated'' by the F.D.A.'s intervention and threatened to pull the American Red Cross out of the blood business; the F.D.A. took the threat seriously enough to draw up a contingency plan. Kessler refuses to talk about Elizabeth Dole, on the principle that talking about a woman he regulates, who is married to a man who has pledged to fire him, can do him no good.

In Kessler's enthusiastic oversight of the Red Cross can be found at least one clue to his high profile: he has been muscular in enforcing the regulatory statutes at his command and not at all shy about publicizing this muscularity. Early in his tenure, he earned the nickname ''Eliot Knessler,'' which is one of the nicer things he has been called in Washington. All too often, I have heard Kessler's critics use Nazi imagery to characterize his job performance; Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post even referred to the F.D.A. as the ''Food Gestapo.''

At bottom, though, Kessler's high profile may simply be a reflection of the awesome reach of the F.D.A. As head of a 9,000-person agency within the Health and Human Services Department, Kessler is one of the few bureaucrats below the rank of assistant secretary who have regular access to the President. The issues facing the agency today are as complex as its mandate, but at the core of each issue is a single question as old as regulation itself: where is the border between responsible consumer protection and obstructionist meddling? Conservatives say that Kessler crossed the line long ago.

''David is a liberal, and there's no question that liberals think the F.D.A. can do no wrong whatsoever,'' says Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who backed Kessler for Commissioner but is now one of his most persistent critics. ''The liberals think the more time the F.D.A. takes to approve products and the stronger they adhere to the zero-risk quotient, which means little or no American innovation or ingenuity, the better off we are.''

There are two paradoxes in the Republican criticism of Kessler: one is that he is a Republican himself (a Rockefeller Republican, to be sure). That he happily joined the Clinton Administration after his service under Bush was proof to many Republicans of his weak character.

''The Republicans consider David a traitor,'' says Kessler's boss, Donna Shalala, the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Even worse, the Republicans believe that he campaigned to keep his job, a violation of Washington mores. Kessler did make a speech during the transition that seemed sympathetic to the Clinton vision of regulation, but he denies campaigning and Shalala backs him up: ''The White House asked me who I wanted to keep and David was first on my list.''

Kessler was seen, until the transition at least, as nonpartisan. When he was appointed in 1990, the F.D.A. itself was less politicized: the Bush Administration was not looking to privatize the agency but merely to salvage it. The F.D.A. had just been tarred by a scandal involving corrupt generic drug inspectors and was widely perceived as limp and underachieving. Kessler, 39 at the time, brought to the agency a reformer's zeal and a perfect resume: he had law and medical degrees from the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively; he had taught food and drug law at Columbia Law School, had been medical director of the Albert Einstein teaching hospital in the Bronx and had, fatefully, served as a staff member on Senator Hatch's Labor and Human Resources Committee.

Another paradox of the Republicans' criticism concerns the main charge directed at Kessler: that the F.D.A. drags out the drug-approval process interminably. That might very well have been true a decade ago, but according to a General Accounting Office study, the F.D.A. slashed the time it takes to approve new drugs from an average of 33 months in 1987 to 19 in 1992. In fiscal 1994, the F.D.A. says, it reviewed 96 percent of all new drug applications within 12 months. And in 1995 approval times for cancer and AIDS drugs dropped even more sharply.

''People have formed set ideological views to the point that they're not willing to recognize the changes under Dr. Kessler, particularly since 1993, in the speeding up of drug approval,'' says Vice President Gore.

Some Republicans, though, take credit for any acceleration. ''Kessler doesn't do anything without pressure from us,'' says Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, a deregulation advocate. Coats blames the F.D.A. for forcing the pharmaceutical industry to spend more time on drug development than ever before, a claim that the industry happily seconds. Republicans also criticize, on firmer ground, the F.D.A.'s lag time in approving medical devices, anything from an ultrasound breast-cancer detector to a threaded fusion cage, a device for treating degenerative disk disorder. The F.D.A. is required to review most types of medical devices within 90 days; in 1995, on average, it took 136.

Gore suggests another possible reason for Kessler's vilification: ''Since the tobacco industry sees Dr. Kessler as an incorruptible force for good, which means he's against them, they have made him their bete noire. They've gone all out to try to attack him.''

Several conservative foundations leading the anti-F.D.A. campaign are financed in part by tobacco companies, a fact that Kessler's allies eagerly note. And many of his opponents in Congress, including Burr, represent tobacco states or, like Coats, are top recipients of tobacco industry largess.

It may be that Kessler's unpopularity is simply the price paid by regulators in a culture that glorifies outlaws and entrepreneurs. Every day, Kessler confronts the American ambivalence toward his role. ''Ask whether Government should get off the backs of business, get out of our lives, and the answer is always a resounding yes,'' he says. ''Then ask whether Government has a role to play in protecting the food supply and the blood supply, and you get a resounding yes. That's the American way.''

A Death He Can Do Nothing About

Did George Korizis die because the benevolent filter of Government that stood between manufacturer and consumer was removed by Congressional fiat? David Kessler suggests so one day in his office: ''I don't think you can deregulate in areas of public health without real effects on real people.''

For Kessler, the law that changed everything was the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which exempts self-styled dietary supplements, like Ripped Fuel, from stringent F.D.A. oversight. Manufacturers of dietary supplements had conducted a no-holds-barred campaign to get the act passed, portraying the F.D.A. as the enemy of unfettered free enterprise; one TV commercial weirdly presaged today's Freeman-style paranoia, showing a Government SWAT team breaking into a man's house to seize his vitamins.

The 1994 supplement law proved a boon to those manufacturers, of course, as well as to consumers who wanted nonprescription access to so-called alternative medicines. But it became a burden for the F.D.A. Before the supplement law, the F.D.A. could force a manufacturer to prove, at its own expense, a product's safety. Today, the F.D.A., at taxpayers' expense, must mount a court case against a specific dietary supplement it believes unsafe.

And it certainly has serious concerns about the safety of ephedrine in dietary supplements. Over the past four years, the agency has received reports of 15 deaths and at least 400 ''adverse events'' associated with such ephedrine use. So Kessler and his advisers walk through the facts of Korizis's death, looking to see if they should build a case against Ripped Fuel.

But Love explains that cocaine, amphetamines and ephedrine can all damage the heart in the same way.

''You can't distinguish the difference among all three?'' Kessler asks.

''Well, we know that he had none of these other products in blood or urine, and there was ephedrine in the urine,'' Love says.

''Tell us what else you were able to get,'' Kessler asks F.D.A. investigators on the speaker phone from Boston.

''His friends threw out some containers,'' one investigator says. ''There were various containers of vitamins, but they couldn't recollect what they threw out.''

''Shoot,'' Kessler mutters.

The Korizis death is a tougher case for the F.D.A. than that of Peter Schlendorf, a 20-year-old Long Island man who died after swallowing eight pills of Ultimate Xphoria, which includes mahuang and caffeine and promises an herbal high. Because products like Ultimate Xphoria are marketed as alternatives to street drugs, it's easier for the F.D.A. to crack down on them than on products marketed as nutritional supplements.

This becomes clear as the meeting progresses. Kessler, aware that the facts of the Korizis death don't yet warrant action, issues a call for more information, hoping especially for something definitive from the Boston medical examiner.

''They didn't realize the significance of the case,'' Love says. ''After it was explained to them, they showed interest ---- ''

'' ---- in putting two and two together,'' Kessler finishes.

After the meeting, Kessler sits on the edge of his couch, Diet Coke in hand, and talks about the impact of the 1994 supplement law.

''No one intended for the act to have these consequences,'' he says, referring to mahuang-related deaths. He speaks slowly and carefully as he edges close to implicating Congress. ''In some ways, if you think about it, you could have predicted it. You open a loophole and now we're dealing with the consequences.''

The proposals to trim the F.D.A.'s reach come after more than half a century of almost continual expansion of that reach. The agency was founded in 1906 after scandals involving adulterated food and quack doctors. It was empowered to monitor drug safety by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which passed amid outrage over the deaths of more than 100 children who ingested a flawed sulfa drug. In 1962, in the wake of the thalidomide disaster overseas (thalidomide was kept out of America by a skeptical F.D.A. reviewer named Frances Kelsey), the agency was allowed to demand from companies more extensive clinical and efficacy testing of new drugs.

What Kessler fears, he says, is that a drug fast-tracked to the marketplace will go on to kill people. This fear, critics contend, is what stops him from taking bold steps toward reform. ''David ought to be the first one to say that people are dying because we're not getting drugs through fast enough,'' Senator Hatch says. ''He is paralyzed by the idea that a dangerous drug will slip through.''

Not a bad thing to be, Shalala suggests: ''I want him to be kept up at night over questions of safety.''

The Mentor and the Errant Protege

Among F.D.A. critics like Hatch, it is an idea as inviolate as Scripture itself that people die because David Kessler refuses to release the drugs that could save their lives.

But the Commissioner's most prominent critics are often stumped when asked to cite a particular drug. C. Boyden Gray, the former Bush White House counsel who is now the chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy, could not name any such drug, even though his organization regularly bashes the F.D.A. for laggard approval times. Sam Kazman, the general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has accused the F.D.A. of causing thousands of deaths by dragging out its review process, also stumbles on this question. When asked to give examples of drugs that were stalled in review, Kazman could name only one -- Elmiron, which treats a chronic bladder disease. (According to the drug's maker, Ivax, Elmiron has been declared ''approvable'' by the F.D.A. and has been available for several years under the agency's ''compassionate use'' guidelines, which allow a company to provide drugs that are still in clinical testing to patients in dire need.)

Even Hatch, Kessler's long-ago mentor, has trouble producing concrete charges against the F.D.A. Indeed, Hatch's criticism of Kessler seems more personal than ideological. During an interview in his office, Hatch offers, without prompting, a neatly organized presentation of his Kessler problem.

''Let me talk about the publicity-seeking aspect of David,'' he begins, reading from handwritten notes. Kessler, the Senator says, is too eager for self-aggrandizement, too nakedly political for an office that should be science-oriented. ''If I have a big criticism of David, it is that he loves publicity and seeks it. I think it's fine for bureaucrats to be interviewed, but he goes overboard.''

It is true that Kessler is a canny political operative who makes headlines. And it is true that Kessler protects his image by cloaking himself in the mantle of medicine, which is why he frequently begins testimony with the words ''As a physician. . . . '' but seldom with the words ''As a lawyer. . . .'' He also assiduously courts sympathetic Congressmen and makes himself readily accessible to reporters.

But Hatch's hostility toward Kessler is apparently motivated by something deeper than media envy. Hatch was a co-sponsor of the 1994 dietary supplement act and he bitterly disputes Kessler's claims that it has allowed dangerous drugs onto the market. ''Kessler's misleading the American public on herbs like mahuang,'' Hatch says. ''Now, any death is tragic, especially when it might have been prevented. But what is even more tragic is that Kessler is laying it at the feet of Congress.''

The fight over the supplement law was the breaking point in the relationship between Hatch and Kessler. The Senator says he now regrets lobbying for Kessler's appointment back in 1990, if only because his opponents never let him forget that his help was crucial: ''The Nader types get great glee in reminding me.''

Kessler, observing the time-honored Washington rule that senators criticize bureaucrats and bureaucrats get criticized by senators, says he will ''only talk in the fondest terms about Senator Hatch.''

But he does add, slyly, ''There's a reason F.D.A. commissioners aren't elected.''

An elected F.D.A. commissioner would almost certainly be driven from office, not necessarily over a grand ideological battle but over a thousand little skirmishes. At any given moment, a dozen interest groups are angry at Kessler and at least a handful are eager to drape his name in glory. It is the nature of such an all-encompassing agency that, during one recent week, Kessler was criticized by a Senate panel for approving potentially life-saving drugs too slowly and criticized by consumer groups for approving an anti-obesity drug, dexfenfluramine, too quickly.

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There is often no orderly theme to attacks on the agency. Take, for example, the criticism of Joe Barton, a Texas Congressman leading the F.D.A. reform fight. Barton, like many Republicans, sees the F.D.A. as an agency that abuses its power. But he has been especially critical of the F.D.A.'s handling of the long-running Halcion saga -- not for overregulating the sleeping pill but for failing to regulate it enough. The F.D.A., faced with information in the early part of Kessler's tenure that Upjohn, Halcion's maker, hid proof of adverse reactions, soft-pedaled its investigation and did not refer the case to the Justice Department. This spring, an F.D.A. task force found that the case was indeed mishandled, and Kessler admits that the agency ''made a mistake.''

A victory for Barton, then, but a strange one, considering that he wants to weaken the F.D.A.'s hold over pharmaceutical companies like Upjohn (now known as Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc.).

Or take a June editorial in The Wall Street Journal, which has elevated Kessler to the ranks of its first-tier Administration targets. The Journal's editorial page, a dogged proponent of deregulation, in this case blasted Kessler for being too slow in issuing new regulations concerning mammography quality.

''As long as they have something to beat us up on,'' Kessler says with feigned resignation.

But there are still stranger sights these days than conservatives calling for more stringent regulation. Consider the new stance toward drug acceleration within the AIDS lobby, which has historically been implacably hostile to the F.D.A. It was the intense lobbying of AIDS activists, of course, that prompted the stepped-up approval of new drugs. But these drugs are now being released so fast -- several new protease inhibitors were recently approved in a matter of weeks -- that some AIDS experts think it may be time to refine the F.D.A.'s review process. ''Once the drug is on the market, the incentives for companies to do the trials, to confirm their clinical efficacy, is much less,'' says Ellen C. Cooper, clinical research director of Amfar, the American Foundation for AIDS Research. ''Everybody is in favor of getting rid of inefficiencies, of dead time in the process, but am I willing to give up three or six months for more information? Absolutely.''

Kessler, having cast his lot with accelerated drug approval, defends it -- to a point. ''We have pushed drug review time probably as short as can be and still do a credible job,'' he says.

Cooper, a former F.D.A. official, responds with a rare note of understanding for Kessler: ''As a regulator, you can never get it exactly right.''

The End of Tobacco as We Know It?

Paulette Kessler is doping out the pluses and minuses of Government service and is coming up in the red.

''What's the payoff?'' she asks her husband as they sit in their living room in suburban Maryland. ''Let me know when you figure it out.''

Paulette Kessler is a slight, youthful-looking woman, a lawyer by training and the mother of the Kesslers' two children, Elise, 13, and Ben, 11. She does not fear letting her opinions be known: she plainly states that she would like to leave Washington and the people who regularly excoriate her husband. ''Every time there's a rumor that he's leaving the job,'' she says, ''the joke is that I started it.''

On the other hand, she suggests, as long as her husband remains F.D.A. Commissioner, he might as well bloody the tobacco industry. She is the hothead in this house, it seems. It is an odd thing about her husband, how coldly clinical he comes across on an issue weighted with such emotion.

Because the tobacco companies are suing the F.D.A. to keep it out of the nicotine-regulation business, Kessler steps lightly. He won't even give in to public moralizing. Once, when I asked him to comment on the mock anguish in yuppie investor circles about the morality of buying Philip Morris stock, Kessler rolled his eyes. ''Do I really have to give stock tips?'' he asked plaintively.

But tonight in his home, over a dinner of takeout Oriental chicken salad, I hope he will talk about whatever it is that motivates his tobacco war. I am stymied for a moment, though, by the dressing that comes with the salad; I fear the hidden fat in most dressings. But after watching Kessler pour dressing on his salad, I follow suit. Surely the F.D.A. Commissioner wouldn't let dangerous dressing into his house.

Is it anger, I ask him, that feeds the tobacco campaign?

''Let me step back and answer that in a little longer way,'' he begins. ''Let me answer that as a pediatrician and as a parent. Look at adolescence. What's going on during adolescence? The search for identity, the rebellion, but at the same time, the need to conform. The looking for cues from one's peers, the need to feel accepted. In the end, it is a search for self-esteem. What the tobacco industry has known for a long time were these vulnerabilities of adolescence. And rather than using that knowledge to reduce the incidence of kids becoming addicted, they played on that knowledge.''

Focusing solely on under-age smoking seems an indirect way of fighting tobacco. But, Kessler explains, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, there is a 90 percent chance that a person will not take up smoking if he or she makes it to 19 without having started.

So Kessler, who understood that it was politically untenable to propose an outright ban on tobacco, devised with his staff a new way of looking at nicotine: as a pediatric disease. Through a barrage of policy papers and interviews during the past two years, Kessler helped to shift the debate away from the concept of ''adult choice,'' putting the tobacco industry on the defensive. He forced it to agree with him, in theory at least, that children shouldn't smoke -- it couldn't possibly do otherwise -- while knowing that teen-age smokers represent the industry's future in America.

Ultimately, though, the F.D.A. could not have taken the offensive without the mistakes made by the tobacco industry. Cigarette companies had left behind a paper trail stating their goals of developing, through clever advertising campaigns, children as customers. Leaked industry documents also show that some companies privately recognized cigarettes as little more than nicotine-delivery devices. What the tobacco companies aggressively dispute, and what will undoubtedly be argued in court, is whether, as the F.D.A. charges, the industry manipulated the nicotine levels in cigarettes to create addiction.

In interviews, Kessler tends to answer questions about the F.D.A.'s tobacco campaign by reading directly from tobacco industry documents; it is his way of avoiding a discussion of his own opinions, certainly, and also his way of letting the enemy make his case. And so it is tonight: Kessler roots around his living room in search of a document. ''Here,'' he says, thumbing his way through some oft-visited pages in cigarette company reports from the 1970's that were recently obtained by the F.D.A. '' 'The adolescent seeks to display his new urge for independence with a symbol, and cigarettes are such a symbol,' '' he reads. '' 'The fragile, developing self-image of the young person needs all of the support and enhancement it can get. Smoking may appear to enhance that self-image in a variety of ways. This self-image enhancement effect has traditionally been a strong promotional theme for cigarette brands.' ''

He takes a breath and puts the document down silently, as if that's all that needs to be said.

So doesn't that make him angry?

''There's a time and place for anger,'' he says, ''but not in this job.''

What the conversation does produce are strong hints about where Kessler hopes to carry his anti-cigarette campaign. So far, some of the F.D.A.'s ideas have won wide attention: the proposals to ban cigarette vending machines, to forbid sporting events from naming themselves after tobacco companies, to halt distribution of Joe Camel-style paraphernalia and to force cigarette companies to abandon their visually seductive magazine ads, restricting them to text-only ads in magazines with significant teen-age readership. But it is not enough, Kessler tells me, to separate advertisers from their target audience. Teen-agers must be actively convinced that smoking is, in his words, ''uncool.''

There is a provision, mostly unnoticed, in the proposed F.D.A. regulations that demands $150 million each year from tobacco companies to finance anti-smoking ads. It is this sort of campaign, Kessler says, that will help the Federal Government reach its goal of cutting under-age smoking in half over the next seven years.

''You want to talk about getting angry -- ask a 16- or 17-year-old how they feel when they see an 11- or 12-year-old smoke a cigarette,'' Kessler says, implying that an ad featuring a teen-ager attacking cigarettes would prove more effective than a simple advertising ban.

And if it doesn't?

''What the agency has said is that once we assert jurisdiction over tobacco, we will put these measures into effect. And then if there needs to be other measures, we'll take other measures.''

This is what frightens the tobacco industry, the idea that banning vending machines and rodeo sponsorship isn't the end for Kessler. He won't say what measures he would take if the current proposals prove ineffective, but there is speculation that he would try to force tobacco companies to produce cigarettes that are less toxic and less addictive.

It may have been Kessler's threat of even more regulation that in May prompted Philip Morris, America's largest cigarette maker, to issue with another tobacco company a plan to curb under-age smoking. The plan, which Philip Morris said would be adopted only if the F.D.A. agreed to leave the industry unregulated, mimics the F.D.A. proposals in many ways. But it is laced with holes and semantic sleights of hand. For one thing, the F.D.A. proposal states that the text-only cigarette ads would appear in magazines with 15 percent or more under-age readers; the Philip Morris proposal calls for the ads in magazines with 15 percent or more under-age subscribers, which would allow visual ads in, for instance, Rolling Stone.

''Their proposal fell substantially short,'' Kessler says.

But what if the tobacco industry truly matched the F.D.A.'s plan, proposal for proposal? Would the agency step aside?

''They would still need to be regulated,'' Kessler says, giving no quarter. ''It would have to be credibly done. There would need to be a regulatory framework.''

Kessler can afford to feel cocky just now; the new rules aren't yet in effect and the lawsuits from the tobacco companies haven't yet been heard. It is far from certain, though, that the Supreme Court would view sympathetically any attempt by a Government agency to regulate advertising or let the F.D.A. force the tobacco industry to sponsor anti-smoking messages.

Over the course of a dozen conversations, it becomes clear to me that Kessler won't leave the F.D.A., willingly at least, until he humbles the tobacco industry. I asked him what he would do if he lost the fight. He replied that, with the fundamental perception about cigarettes so radically altered, losing is no longer possible. ''The truth,'' he said, ''will survive.''

What Do Americans Truly Want From Kessler?

It is almost certainly true that David Kessler is the only regulator in Government service who draws admirers the way that, say, George Stephanopoulos does. This should help his battle against cigarettes, except that he doesn't seem to like the attention.

''You're David Kessler, right?'' a woman asks as she passes him in the cereal aisle of a Bethesda supermarket. After an uncomfortable pause, he admits that he is. ''Keep up the good work on cigarettes,'' she says.

This happens twice more in 20 minutes. Granted, the supermarket is located inside the Beltway, deep in NPR and Volvo country, but such attention is presumably not accorded, even here, to high officials of the F.T.C. or OSHA.

Kessler and I are visiting the supermarket to discuss the impact of one of his key achievements: the 1994 introduction of the more-than-you-ever-wanted-toknow food labels, which place into dietary context the amount of fat in nearly every product sold in American food stores.

''I suppose I'm guilty,'' Kessler says as he reaches for a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chubby Hubby ice cream (350 calories per serving, 210 from fat). ''If you're asking for a public apology for every time you've put something back on a shelf after reading the label, I'm guilty and I apologize. Sometimes, I pick up something and read the label and put it back. Sometimes I don't.''

Surely David Kessler, a man painted by his enemies as an abstemious kvetch, bent on bleeding the joy out of life in the name of public health, doesn't eat ice cream? ''In moderation,'' he says, then puts the Chubby Hubby back in the freezer.

He sweeps his arm across the aisle. ''Look at this selection,'' he says, referring to the logjam of ''low fat'' and ''no fat'' products. ''What we did with the new food labels -- it's about information. Information created demand. The food label changed the way manufacturers manufacture. What the critics of the new food labeling don't understand is that it's about choice.''

Kessler's critics, though, say that the new food label, like the battle to regulate tobacco, is an example of an imperious Government agency infantilizing the American public by deciding what's in its best interests.

Just ask Walker Merryman, a Washington lobbyist.

''Have you ever looked at what Kessler did with orange juice?'' he says, referring to the F.D.A.'s 1991 seizure of thousands of gallons of Citrus Hill orange juice. The juice was made from concentrate, and the company, Procter & Gamble, had refused to remove the word ''fresh'' from the label.

''Now, I love orange juice, I really do,'' Merryman continues. ''But I only like fresh. I remember seeing the advertising for this brand and I saw the word 'fresh,' right under the brand. I also remember that it was clear to anyone who looked at it that the orange juice was made from concentrate. But not to Kessler. I remember thinking when he seized it, that's the dumbest goddamn thing I've ever heard of. Does he think people can't read a $(expletive$) label? Kessler thinks consumers are too damn dumb to look at a label and make up their minds. There's a philosophical divide we're talking about here.''

Now, discount for a moment that Walker Merryman, the orange juice lover, is also the vice president of the Tobacco Institute, the industry trade group, and a prime spokesman for the ''adult choice'' cigarette argument. Merryman's view of Kessler is similar to that of most F.D.A. critics, who see at the core of everything that Kessler's agency does a flock of theoretically brilliant, Ivy League-trained lawyers who believe in their ability to protect Americans from themselves and who believe even more in their own superiority.

It doesn't take long, in fact, for some of the F.D.A.'s detractors to veer away from specific, policy-based criticisms to a sort of amorphous, class-based attack rooted in the cultural divide between Eastern, Government-friendly elites and everyone else. Such is the case with Joe Barton, the Texas Republican. When I asked him to talk in specific terms about the agency's weaknesses, he said: ''They've had regulatory authority for so long that they think they're above people. To me, they're like the professional bureaucracy of the French Government. If they're supposed to go to lunch at 12, they do, and they come back at 2, and you'll just have to cool your heels waiting for these people.''

Kessler, predictably, is hesitant to analyze the culture gap that may explain some of the hostility directed at him. He usually prefers instead to make mention of an eternal verity about Government regulation: ''If you want to make people happy, don't become a regulator.'' He says this ruefully, but only half seriously, because he does believe that most Americans, when faced with a choice in the matter, would opt to have the Government watching over ''the stuff they put into their bodies,'' as he calls it.

What's at stake on Capitol Hill is just how much watching the F.D.A. will be allowed to do in the future. Though he was pessimistic in May about the Republican legislation, Kessler seemed less burdened by July. Some Republican leaders in the House began to worry that a push for radical F.D.A. deregulation, and the floor fight that could follow, would be unhelpful to the party, still reeling from the perception that it had tried to gut environmental regulation.

In late July, the Republicans agreed to one major compromise, on an issue concerning both the F.D.A. and the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans had wanted to scrap the Delaney Clause, a 1958 law that banned carcinogens in food additives and pesticides. Most scientists agreed that the Delaney standards were outdated, but the Administration didn't want to repeal the law unless it was replaced with other safeguards. Congressional Republicans are now proposing to do just that, having devised pesticide standards that are acceptable to Democrats while keeping, for now, the food-additive provisions of the Delaney Clause.

But support for deregulation still runs strong and, even if Congressional Republicans jettison their F.D.A. wish list, they are still pushing to check the agency's power. Meanwhile, Kessler continues to fight the impact of previous deregulation. Trying to take action against ephedrine in the wake of George Korizis's death, the F.D.A. is now investigating, at its own expense, each of the several hundred adverse events linked to ephedrine in dietary supplements.

And then there is the F.D.A.'s plan to regulate tobacco, which could be unveiled by President Clinton even before the Republican Convention. The announcement would surely be the climax of Kessler's F.D.A. stewardship. A few weeks ago, I asked him if he worries about a Dole victory this November and the attempt to undo tobacco regulation that might well follow follow.

Kessler dodged the question, as he dodges nearly all partisan questions, instead taking the opportunity to scold the agency's critics for misunderstanding the American public. ''I learned something when I was Senate staff in 1981 and 1982,'' he said, referring to the early Reagan era and its deregulatory fervor. ''The public does not want deregulation in the areas of health and safety. Time and time again, there are people on the Hill who misjudge this.''

I asked Kessler if perhaps, as a young Republican, he, too, misread the public's position and is now repenting for that misreading. It is the sort of question that Kessler doesn't like, so he gave a nonanswer: ''I watched the Republicans coming to deregulate the F.D.A., and in the end it didn't work because it's not what the American people want.''

He is too cautious to make bold predictions, but he sees the current push for deregulation as a pendulum swing brought on, as it were, by the agency's success. ''The better we prevent things from ever happening, people will feel more and more secure about their food and drugs, and the more pressure there will be on us to stop regulating. But the pendulum is dangerous. People get hurt by the pendulum. It's been the same pattern for 40 or 50 years.''

Kessler is confident that, current F.D.A. controversies notwithstanding, the pendulum will swing back in the agency's direction. ''There's a disconnect in this country on this issue -- I mean, take a look at Britain,'' he said, referring to mad cow disease. ''The Government could have fallen, and over what? A food issue. And here they want to lower safety standards. In Britain, the one thing they're crying out for is a commission that has no other conflicts or loyalties other than making sure the public health is well served. Well, we already have that here.''

The F.D.A. is embattled these days, and not just because of opposition from Congressional Republicans and the tobacco industry. David Kessler's agency regulates just about everything Americans put in their bodies, and there are plenty of other contested issues on its agenda. Here's a sample.

Cyclospora: This summer the agency is pouring resources into trying to understand cyclospora, the protozoa that have recently caused severe diarrhea in hundreds of people. Along with the Centers for Disease Control, the F.D.A. has been searching for the source of this outbreak in, among other places, raspberries from Guatemala. The F.D.A., which regulates all food except meat and poultry (the Agriculture Department oversees those), has the power to pull adulterated foods off the market and to keep them out of the country.

Bovine Growth Hormone: The F.D.A. is awaiting a follow-up report on bovine somatotropin (BST), an artificial hormone used to increase the milk output of dairy cows. The F.D.A. has already approved the drug, but because consumer advocates and scientists feared that BST might harm humans, the agency demanded that Monsanto, its manufacturer, conduct a two-year study on its possible deleterious effects.

Olestra: Fat-free potato chips made with the much-hyped olestra, a fat substitute manufactured by Procter & Gamble, are causing diarrhea and other intestinal problems. The F.D.A. is under attack from the Center for Science in the Public Interest for allowing olestra onto the market, even though the agency did insist on a label informing consumers of the potential for ''loose stools'' in products containing olestra.

RU-486: The first ''morning after'' abortion pill, developed in France, is being fast-tracked for review and possible approval. A decision could come as soon as September; approval is probable, given that two weeks ago an F.D.A. advisory panel endorsed the drug.

Med Guides: The F.D.A. under Kessler has reintroduced an idea proposed during the Carter Administration: demanding that pharmacies to provide more in-depth information about the drugs they dispense. These ''Med Guides,'' as the F.D.A. calls them, would essentially be a drug equivalent of the information-packed food labels required by the F.D.A. two years ago. Med Guides now seem likely to be required, despite opposition by druggists and deregulation-minded members of Congress.

Dexfenfluramine: The agency is under attack from some consumer advocates for giving the go-ahead to this drug, the first anti-obesity drug approved by the F.D.A. in 23 years. Sold by Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories under the name Redux, dexfenfluramine is already on the market; some scientists speculate that it may cause neurological and lung damage.

Xenotransplantation: An F.D.A. panel is now weighing the issues surrounding the transplanting of animal tissue into humans, like the recent use of baboon bone marrow in an AIDS patient and the possible transplantation of primate and pig organs into humans. The agency will most likely issue guidelines by the end of the year.

Correction: August 25, 1996, Sunday A photograph with an article on Aug. 4 about David Kessler and the Food and Drug Administration made an incorrect association between some potato chips and olestra, a fat substitute. The colored chips in the photograph, Terra Chips, are made with peanut, sunflower or canola oil, not olestra.